Hell's Gate m-1

by David Weber

  "Could?" He stopped, cleared his throat. "Could she have survived something like that?"

  "I don't know." The Tracer's voice was hollow, full of bleak uncertainty and exhaustion. "I'm no surgeon, Darcel. I can't even tell what part of her brain was injured, only that it felt … critical. If the injury wasn't in a life-threatening area, if they had a skilled surgeon close enough … "

  Hilovar didn't have to finish. There were probably no more than a dozen surgeons in all of Sharona's far-flung universes who would have been capable of repairing the sort of damage Hilovar was sensing. What were the odds that a pack of crossbow-armed barbarians would have a surgeon with those skills with them out here in the middle of these godsforsaken woods?

  Hope died, messily, and what grew in its place was colder than the frozen Arpathian hells. It cut through him, cruel as any razor, and it hungered.

  Darcel Kinlafia looked into Soral Hilovar's eyes and caressed the butt of his revolver almost gently.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Jathmar remembered his own wistful thoughts about the joy of flight on the morning of the nightmare attack?was it really only two days ago??and how he'd envied even a common sparrow's ability to wheel and dart and soar.

  Now, as the peered down at the distant ground through the glass face shield and cold wind whipped over him in an icy hurricane, he discovered that anything he'd ever imagined fell far short of the truth. The sheer exhilaration of actually streaking through the sky was so great, so overwhelming, that it actually pushed his dread of the future awaiting him and Shaylar out of the front of his thoughts. That wasn't something he would have believed was possible, and a corner of his brain wondered if he was concentrating on his delight so hard in part to avoid thinking about that self same future.

  Maybe he was, but that didn't change anything. The creature beneath the platform upon which he and Shaylar were seated, carefully strapped in for safety, was unquestionably the most powerful animal he had ever seen. The sheer strength in every downstroke of those seemingly fragile wings beggared every other notion of animal power he'd ever held, and now that he'd gotten over his initial shock, he could appreciate the creature's?the dragon's?metallic, glittering beauty. The flashes of bronze and copper-colored sunlight, reflected from its scales, were almost blinding, and the ornate pattern on its wings and hide gleamed. Shaylar had to be right, he told himself. That marvelous geometric design had to be artificial, although he couldn't imagine how such intricate patterns had been applied to a living animal's skin.

  In fact, there was a lot about these people that he couldn't imagine, and whatever else befell them, he couldn't suppress his delighted grin as they raced the wind itself. He'd come out here in search of adventure, hadn't he? Well, when it came to unusual, unlikely experiences, riding the back of a dragon which dwarfed any elephant and soared as effortlessly as any eagle had to rank high on the list.

  The sheer speed of the flight was enough to leave him gasping in amazement. Not even a train barreling down a miles-long straight track could have matched it. He couldn't begin to fathom how a creature so massive could fly so fast. It simply wasn't natural.

  He snorted at the thought. He and Shaylar had already seen a dozen other impossible things, and no doubt they'd see still more. Things nobody on Sharona would even have believed possible. Beneath the anger, the hatred, the fear, the portion of Jathmar Nargra-Kolmayr which had drawn him into the survey crews in the first place struggled to reassert itself. His genuine love of new sights, odd adventures, and places no Sharonian had ever set foot pressed tentatively against the deep traumas of the last ninety-six hours.

  He felt it stirring and wondered what was wrong with him. How could he possibly feel anything except fear, anxiety, hatred for the people who'd murdered his friends, crippled his wife's Talent, almost killed him? How could there be room for anything else?

  He didn't know. The fact that he couldn't banish his silly grin made him feel guilty, as if he were betraying his dead friends' memories, yet there it was, and he couldn't convince himself Ghartoun, or Barris, or Falsan would have begrudged him the feeling. It wasn't enough to set those darker, harsher emotions aside. Even if it had been, he wasn't prepared to do that yet, for many complex reasons. It would be a long time before he was prepared to even consider truly relinquishing that darkness. Yet there was a deep, almost soothing comfort in discovering that an important part of him, one he valued deeply, hadn't died with his friends among the toppled trees.

  He recalled Shaylar's attempt to comfort Gadrial's distress and wondered if she struggled with some of the same feelings. Maybe she was simply braver than he was. Maybe it was just that she'd already recognized the truth in that ancient, banal clich? about life going on. Certainly there was an undeniable edge of bad melodrama in refusing to recognize that they had to make the best of whatever came their way. If they wanted to do more than merely survive, wanted to continue to be the people they'd always been before, then they had to discover things which could still bring them joy, people they could still care about. Perhaps Shaylar simply understood that better than he did. Or perhaps she simply had the courage to go ahead and admit it and reach out, risking fresh hurt because she refused to surrender to despair.

  He reached down to cover Shaylar's hands with his own, where she'd wrapped them around his waist, and gave her fingers a gentle squeeze. He couldn't tell her why, not with the wind snatching sound away, but she tightened her arms around him in a brief return gesture, then leaned more of her weight against his back and the sturdy, borrowed shirt he wore.

  It felt strange, that shirt. It was a uniform shirt, made of heavy cotton twill, comfortable, and certainly rugged enough for the purpose of exploring virgin universes, but with a cut unlike anything Jathmar had ever seen. Sharonian shirts were simply two panels of cloth which met in front and buttoned down the center, but this shirt had a complicated bib-like construction, with two rows of buttons where the left panel and right panel overlapped a third, which lay beneath the other two.

  Jasak Olderhan had shown him how to fasten it up. It wasn't one of Olderhan's own shirts, since Jathmar would have been lost in the taller, broader man's garments. He suspected it had belonged to one of the men killed in the fighting, which gave him a distinctly odd feeling. Still, he'd needed a shirt, and clothing wasn't among the things Olderhan's men had taken away from the survey crew's abandoned camp.

  Not that they hadn't taken plenty of other things. Several heavy cases?obviously purpose-designed canisters specifically intended to be transported by dragons?were strapped to the platform behind the wounded. Those cases contained all the guns and every piece of equipment they'd been carrying on the battle. From the looks of it, they also contained a fair percentage of the equipment they'd abandoned in camp, as well. Olderhan's men had even carried out the spare ammunition boxes.

  At some point, Jathmar knew, Olderhan was going to "ask" them to demonstrate all of that equipment's use. Including the guns. He wasn't looking forward to that, but for the moment, streaking through the sky on a creature out of mythology, suspended between what had happened and what was yet to happen, he was able to set those worries aside and simply enjoy the breathtaking experience of riding the wind.

  Below them, as far as he could see, lay miles and miles of trackless swamp. He'd discovered that his Mapping Talent worked just fine from up here?or would have, if not for the fact that he'd never in his life moved this quickly. Trying to sort out everything his Talent let him See was all but impossible simply because of the speed with which it came at him. He was sure he could have learned to compensate with practice, but for now he couldn't make a great deal of sense out of what he was Seeing. Which was particularly frustrating, since he rather doubted that his captors realized they'd given him the opportunity to chart a perfect escape route … if only he'd been up to the challenge.

  But if he couldn't See all he would have liked to, there was more than enough he could see. Brilliant sunlight scattered diamonds across the
open patches of water among the reeds, swampy hillocks, and patches of trees. Vast clouds of birds rose in alarm as the dragon flashed overhead: graceful waterbirds with snowy white wings and dove grey wings and wings of darker hues that were doubtless herons and cranes.

  They were too high to see any of the other animals which inhabited that vast swamp, but Jathmar had little doubt that there'd be plenty of crocodiles or alligators of some sort down there, along with fish, water-loving mammals, and millions upon millions of crustaceans. He wished he could figure out where they were, though, and he couldn't. The shape of land masses never varied from one universe to the next, but one stretch of swamp was very like any other, and he had absolutely no reference points to try and figure out where this one lay. If he could look at the stars tonight, he would at least be able to tell whether they were in the northern hemisphere, or the southern, but he was unhappily certain that the information wouldn't do him a great deal of good.

  Although I suppose I'll at least draw a certain amount of mental satisfaction out of putting my astronomy lessons to good use.

  They'd flown several hundred miles, at least, when the dragon finally began to descend just as Jathmar spotted a clearing near the beach. A fort had been built along the edge of a sheltered bay, where a stream emptied from the swamp into the sea in a startling plume of dark water that stained the turquoise seawater for a surprising distance. Despite a lifetime spent Mapping, Jathmar had never consciously thought about dark, nutrient-rich water creating such a visible stain in much clearer seawater, let alone how it would look from the air. It was almost like a painting?swirls of color like the strokes of a brush across canvas, unexpected and beautiful.

  Then they were circling over the fort itself, and he turned his attention to their destination. It was a fairly large structure, but scarcely huge, and he nodded inside. Everything he'd seen so far suggested that their captors were operating at the end of an extensive line of relatively unimproved universes, much as the Chalgyn Consortium crew had been doing when they blundered into one another. He'd seen scores of Sharonian forts very much like the one below him. Form followed function, so it was probably a multiversal pattern: an outer stockade, made of thick logs hewn from the clumps of forest dotting the vast swamp, wrapped around a fairly large open courtyard which held several buildings.

  A sturdy, if roughly built, pier ran out into the bay from the seward face of the fort. That, too, was something he'd seen many times before. What he hadn't ever seen was a ship like the one lying alongside that pier, and his eyes narrowed behind the protective glass shield as he studied it.

  It wasn't especially huge?not more than three hundred feet, he estimated, though it could have been a bit more than that?and its sleek lines were unlike those of any ship he'd ever seen before. It was slim, obviously designed for high speed, with sharply flared clipper bows and a graceful sheer. The superstructure seemed enormously top-heavy to Jathmar, far bigger and blockier than any Sharonian ship he'd ever seen, but that might have been partly because there was so little other top hamper. It had only a single mast, whose sole function was clearly to support the lookout pod at its top, and there was no trace of the tall funnels a Sharonian steamer would have boasted. In fact, that was the strangest thing of all, he realized. The ship below him had neither sails nor funnels, so what in the names of all the Uromathian devils made it go?

  He had little time to ponder the question before the dragon backwinged abruptly and touched down with almost terrifying suddenness. His mind shrieked that they were coming in much too quickly for safety, but the wide wings braked their forward movement at the last possible instant. Indeed, they slowed far more quickly than should have been possible with several tons of dragon in motion, then settled in a swirl of beach sand, flying debris from the tide line, and a solid whump. There was no doubt about the moment they touched the ground, but the actual landing was far less jarring than he'd feared from their approach speed. The beast's rear legs touched first, then it settled onto its forelegs, trotted briskly forward for a few dozen yards, and simply stopped.

  Jathmar glanced back into his wife's wide, alarmed eyes, and made himself smile.

  "We made it!" He chuckled, although his breath was a little unsteady. "And we got down in one piece, too! I had my doubts, right there at the end."

  "That was … amazing." Shaylar sounded a bit breathless herself as she uncurled her fingers from their death grip on his waist. "Really … wow!" she added.

  Gadrial appeared from behind them, smiling at their obvious reaction to the flight and landing. She showed them how to unbuckle the complex straps, then signaled for them to wait while the seriously wounded were offloaded first. The men who'd come out to meet the dragon?there were substantially fewer of them than a fort this size should have boasted, Jathmar thought?had sorted themselves out into two?no, three?types.

  The first group guided stretchers that floated by themselves. Stretchers, Jathmar realized abruptly, like the "cot" upon which he'd awakened in the swamp base camp. So that's how they transported so many wounded men out, he thought as the stretchers floated straight up the dragon's side, where the wounded were carefully shifted onto them.

  The second sort were either an honor guard or, more likely, a security detail charged with making sure he and his wife didn't attempt something rash. The third, Jathmar pegged as command-and-control types, given the deference the others accorded them. The crossbowmen of the security detail stood rigidly at attention and snapped out crisp salutes as the apparent officers strode past them towards the dragon.

  Then it was the unwounded passengers' turn to descend. The ground abruptly looked much further away, and Jathmar exchanged a single apprehensive glance with Shaylar, who still seemed distinctly unsteady on her feet.

  "Why don't I climb down first, so I can brace you if you lose your grip?" he suggested.

  She nodded, and he drew a quick breath, gave her a bright smile, and climbed over the edge, hooking his feet into the crosswise strands of the web-like ladder.

  The beast's hide was surprisingly warm. He'd expected something so reptilian to be more, well … reptilian. But it was warmer than he was, even through the tough, spiky armored scales. One of the spikes caught at the leg of Jathmar's trousers, and he decided?a little queasily?that he really didn't want to know what was big enough and nasty enough for a beast this size to grow spiked armor to avoid being eaten by it.

  He made it safely to the ground, then reached up to assist Shaylar down the last several inches to the sand. She swayed as her feet touched the ground, forehead creased with a furrow of pain Jathmar didn't like a bit. The distracting excitement of flying was wearing off quickly, he thought, and slipped his arm around her to help support her drooping weight, then turned uncertainly to look for Jasak Olderhan, who'd climbed down ahead of them.

  Olderhan was waiting with grave patience, and when Jathmar turned, he gestured both of them forward with a reassuring smile. They approached him obediently, and he hesitated a moment, then offered Shaylar an arm. It was a gallant gesture, as well as a pragmatic one, given her unsteadiness. And it might just be Jasak's way of sending an important message to the people waiting across the beach, Jathmar thought. He looked down at Shaylar, nodded reluctantly, and watched her lean against the officer's forearm. She looked up at her towering captor and actually produced a smile, despite the bruises and swelling that turned it into a pathetic, lopsided expression that clearly caused her pain.

  Jathmar saw a few widened eyes, and more than one look of sudden uncertainty that bordered on … guilt as Shaylar's tiny size and brutally battered appearance registered. He blinked in surprise when he identified that particular emotion. Then his eyes narrowed as he realized Jasak Olderhan clearly knew what he was doing … and that he appeared to be swaying at least a few opinions. Moving slowly, every step attentive to the bruised and battered woman he escorted, Jasak supported Shaylar across the wide beach while Jathmar walked at her other elbow, ready to catch her if she lost h
er footing in the loose sand.

  They came to a halt before a cluster of three officers. All of them were older than Jasak?two of them by quite a number of years?and Jasak stopped before the eldest of them all. The older officer was a solid, rectangular plug of a man, six inches shorter than Jasak, but still the most imposing man on the beach. Jathmar recognized power when he saw it, and this man, with his iron-gray hair, bull-like neck, and arms that could have snapped Jathmar's spine almost absentmindedly, literally exuded power. His eyes, as gray as his hair, weren't cold so much as wary and observant. He swept his gaze across Jathmar from top to toe, but his granite expression gave away nothing of his thoughts. His gaze lingered considerably longer on Shaylar, and a vertical line drove between his brows as he studied her injured face?and everything else about her?in minute detail.

  Last of all, that cool, appraising gaze centered itself squarely on Sir Jasak Olderhan. Jasak greeted his superior with that curious clenched-fist salute, and the older officer returned it?crisply enough, but with a good deal less formality. Jasak spoke briefly, and his superior asked a question. Jasak answered, and the older man nodded. Then, catching Jathmar by surprise, the man who obviously commanded this military outpost stepped back and gestured them past him and his official entourage.

  Jasak saluted again, then solicitously escorted Shaylar?and, by extension, Jathmar?into the enemy fortress.

  Jathmar's first impression from the air, that this fort wasn't so very different from Sharonian ones?just as the lives of the men stationed in it couldn't be so very different from Sharonian soldiers' lives?had been accurate enough. He readily identified barracks, officers quarters, and a central block which undoubtedly held the fort's command center. There was what looked like a mess hall to one side, and a particularly stoutly constructed building, which was probably the armory or the brig, or might well be both.